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Our Lady
and St Edmund, Hunstanton

We'd
gone up to Hunstanton to see in the New Year.
Some friends in the Midlands had recently bought
a flat there on the seafront, and in the middle
of the hardest winter for years they were very
pleased to have someone go and spend a few days
warming the place up. And goodness, was it
chilly. Earth stood cold as iron, water like a
stone. Even during the day the temperature did
not rise much above freezing, and for the first
time in my life I walked along the sea shore in
the snow.

There was one Hunstanton
church I particularly wanted to see, and not only
because it would be my last Catholic church in
East Anglia. I had promised the goodly priest of
Our Lady and St Edmund a couple of years before
that I would get up here to poke around in his
church, but I had kept putting it off. Hunstanton
is a 170 mile round trip from my house, and I had
already visited every other church in the area,
and so it was not until this opportunity fell my
way that I had been able to keep my promise.

In
addition, I had got into terrible trouble a couple of
years before for what I had written about the Anglican
counterpart of this church, St Edmund - or, more
precisely, for what I had said about the Anglican sister
church at Ringstead. It wasn't exactly
that I was keeping my head down, but as much as I love
this brash, jaunty little town, I felt that I had
probably had enough of it for a little while, and that it
had probably had enough of me.

I had
wandered past the Anglican parish church on my way to Our
Lady and St Edmund. I'd fancied taking a quick peek at
its stunningly beautiful interior, but the door was
locked. I didn't think it would be a good idea to knock
on the Rectory door for the key, at least not under the
present incumbency, and so I set off up the Sandringham
road, stepping rather carefully on the icy pavements.

In these
days when the Catholic church provides the largest single
body of worshippers in England, it is hard to conceive
that the coast of East Anglia had not a single
worshipping Catholic community at the time of the 1851
census of religious worship. Hunstanton was part of the
vast parish of Kings Lynn, more than thirty miles across.
At the time of the building of the church there, the Lynn
Advertiser commented that the parish had less than
150 Catholics all told, and all of them poor. When
the north Norfolk coast's first modern Catholic church
was built at Cromer in 1886, there was such virulent
opposition in the town that it had to be built out in the
suburbs on the road to Overstrand. Appropriately, it was
dedicated to Our Lady of Refuge. As at Cromer, the
Catholic parish church here in Hunstanton was also built
on the edge of town. A combination of poverty and
unpopularity meant that Catholic communities were never
in a position to bid for prime building sites. However,
Catholics in this area had a powerful friend. A few miles
down the road is Sandringham House, built by the future
King Edward VII as his country retreat. At Sandringham he
entertained his many foreign friends, almost all of them
Catholic, and unlike his puritanical mother he was very
supportive of the local Catholic parish, forking out from
his own pocket to enable the church at Lynn to be rebuilt
in a more worthy manner, if only so that his noble
friends would have a fitting place of worship.

North-west
Norfolk was one of the most desperately poor areas of
England at the end of the 19th century, and it was
possible for the future King to buy up vast acreages of
land at a pittance, which he put under cultivation,
providing jobs for local people as well as requiring many
incomers. He is still treated as a bit of a hero in these
parts. As the Catholic population grew, so did the demand
for a Catholic church on the northern side of the estate,
and in 1903 the first small chapel was opened on this
site. It was extended threefold in 1958, and then
augmented again in the 1990s. The church you approach
now, then, is actually a combination of three buildings
of different periods. The original church, turned
sideways, now forms the sanctuary of the modern church.

It would
be fair to say, I think, that this is not an impressive
church from the outside. You enter through the most
recent extension - unlike the Anglican church down in
town, this one was open - and then through glass doors
into an utterly charming interior, beautiful and seemly,
everything on a small scale. A tremendous amount of love
was lavished here, the best of which is in the form of
modern stained glass. There is a simply outstanding
memorial window of 2008 to a local young man who had
trained as a dentist. It depicts St Nicholas, his name
Saint, and St Appolonia, that much-loved and invoked
Saint of medieval England who was turned to by sufferers
from toothache. It is signed PB, and I would love to know
who the artist is. I am afraid it puts Paul Quail's
rather pedestrian 1995 window of the Blessed Virgin and
St Edmund beside it into the shade.

The
sanctuary was still decorated from Christmas, and
it was enchanting, and I thought what a lovely
place this must be to attend Mass. But, not for
the first time, the renewed energy and activity
of the Catholic Church in East Anglia defeated
me. When I came into the church I'd asked the
lady in there if she minded me taking some
photographs. Of course she did not, and so I set
to work on the windows; but while I was doing
this, another lady came up to me and told me
politely that I was welcome to stay, but that the
Holy Hour was about to start. The great thing
about Catholic churches is that they don't really
mind people wandering around during Mass, but I
think that in this particularly intimate space it
would have seemed extremely rude and
disrespectful of me to clamber about their
sanctuary taking photographs while they knelt in
the Presence of the Living God. We were heading
back to Ipswich in an hour, so I couldn't have
waited.

But I will go back, to Mass next
time, and to photograph this beautiful church
more completely afterwards.